Toronto Blue Jays fans in the stands after the Los Angeles Dodgers won Game 7 of the 2025 World Series after extra innings.Sammy Kogan/The Globe and Mail
No one struggling with heartbreak after seeing their team lose a sporting championship wants to waste bandwidth wondering how they’re going to get home. Unfortunately, that’s how Toronto transit agencies left too many baseball fans this weekend.
If Blue Jays supporters had been primed to get out of hand, the way Canucks fans did after losing a Stanley Cup finals in 2011, trapping them downtown after Saturday’s World Series loss could’ve led to serious damage. Instead, the damage is to the reputation of the city, and its transit system.
Admittedly, this may seem the most Toronto thing: Shortly after watching their team lose a championship in extra innings by a single run, after 32 years without a title, locals start kvetching about transit. But it is no trivial matter.
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Toronto is trying to attract investment and top talent, competing with the rest of the world to do so. Transit that falls short sabotages that effort. It’s also an own goal when the city is trying to convince more people to come back downtown and lift the city centre out of a lingering pandemic slump.
What better way to advertise transit as the best way to get around than to make the service seamless, easy and reliable? At its best, transit should be like electricity – you don’t have to think about it, it’s simply there when you need it.
Instead, the Toronto Transit Commission, which runs local service, and the regional transit provider Metrolinx were left red-faced after their supporting roles on the world stage.
To recap, the Toronto Blue Jays played Game 7 of the World Series at their stadium in the city centre. This venue was deliberately built with little on-site parking and most fans walk or take transit to catch games. That would have worked out fine if the game had ended on time. But these teams were evenly matched and a game earlier in the series had already gone into extra innings.
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The same happened Saturday. Then – shortly after midnight, with the game still under way – the City of Toronto posted on social media that transit would stop running soon. The tweet was amplifying a similar message from the TTC.
Imagine being one of the fans in the stands: They’ve spent a lot of money to be there, they’re in the grip of emotion and they’re being encouraged … to leave early?
Of course that’s not going to happen. Fans stuck it out, the Jays lost and tens of thousands of people spilled onto downtown streets. Social media was promptly strewn with images of jammed transit vehicles and, later, people looking for trains that would not start running again until the morning.
Toronto Mayor Olivia Chow speaks to the crowd during a watch party at Nathan Phillips Square for Game 2 of the World Series.Nick Iwanyshyn/The Canadian Press
The UPX and GO train services, both operated by Metrolinx, a provincial agency, shut down before all passengers had made it home. After the last TTC train, passengers were left with the bus, which is slower and carries far fewer people. Many, presumably, opted for an expensive Uber or taxi trip.
To be fair, it’s not clear how many of these fans were the author of their own misfortune. Almost certainly, some were caught short because they lost track of the time in their revelry or commiseration. But many others tried to get to their train before service ended, and were unable to do so.
Announcing in advance that service would run a few extra hours would have given fans the time to enjoy their evening and still get home easily.
To its credit, the TTC did run its trains for an extra hour. The agency also had a contingency plan to extend service longer if it felt circumstance required but decided it wasn’t necessary. Better not to make that call so late, which forces people coming to the game to make contingency plans of their own.
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Metrolinx acknowledges that it can do overnight service for special occasions, such as New Year’s Eve, but argues that it takes months of planning to add staffing and co-ordinate with rail companies that own the track. If that is the case, surely the process can be sped up in crunch situations.
Hopefully this experience will be studied as Toronto prepares to host a half-dozen World Cup games next summer. That venue is not as convenient to transit as the Jays’ stadium, making it all the more important to craft a detailed transportation plan that moves fans smoothly to and from the spot.
Adding to the urgency is that fans of some World Cup teams have a history of hooliganism. Although the era of the worst violence has passed, strains of aggression may lurk closer to the surface in this fan base than a World Series crowd.
Irritating thousands of these fans by stranding them in the central city after a match could cause damage to more than Toronto’s reputation.